Django 1.6.2 and 1.7a2 released | Hacker News Reader

Django 1.6.2 and 1.7a2 released

djangoproject.com

108 pointscdjk24 comments

I clicked, read, nodded in approval and upvoted.. There's nothing really to discuss. There are a few new features in 1.7 that people are looking forward to but nothing really controversial.

Start a discussion about Python 3, on the other hand, and you'll get multi-page comments.

I see they plan to use pyinotify if installed (Linux only).

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.7/#manageme...

Any reason to stay away from the cross plateforme Watchdog?

http://packages.python.org/watchdog/

Perhaps to keep hard dependencies down? I guess pyinotify is installed on a lot of environments already or something.

There is a striking contrast on HN between this release and say, when Node or Rails release a new version. At the one hour point since this was posted and there are no comments.

Anybody use Django? Or just not excited about this release? I'm genuinely curious.

Yes, I use Django, among many people. The 1.6.2 is just a minor bug fix release. I'll upgrade to it tomorrow, but it isn't that exciting.

I haven't been following 1.7, so someone else will have to comment on that.

Built-in schemamigration and refactored app loading in 1.7 are extremely exciting in my opinion.

South has worked well for us, but 1.7's built-in migration squashing/rebasing has me excited by itself. I have to run some really hackish custom stuff to do this on South right now.

The packages we typically use have shown a few rough edges when we took 1.7a1 for a test drive, so we submitted some pull requests and that was that.

It took us about an hour to get the site up on 1.7a1. This announcement came too late today to try 1.7a2 yet.

There's not a lot to be excited about really - the major feature in this release is schema migration. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily and suspect many python developers appreciate the slowish and thoughtful release cycles for Django.

> the major feature in this release is schema migration

And I think a lot of people aren't commenting about that because it's not "new" per se and is done well by South.

I am wondering what the real difference will be in day to day use? Other than the "south" line in installed apps, it sounds like it will be very similar.

As I understand it, the new migrations module is more fully featured than south: eg, it intelligently squashes/flattens migrations together to avoid redundancy when you run the migrations (say you create a model in migration 1, and remove it in migration 3 after changing approach, the whole operation will be skipped).[0] This will speed things up if you have a lot of migrations to run.

I think I heard that some of this stuff will be backported to South for those of us stuck on 1.5/1.6, however.

[0] http://www.aeracode.org/2013/10/23/flat-pancake/

I think we're all just waiting for 1.7. I hope upgrading won't be too cumbersome due the change in schema migrations.

I read the documentation today and it's actually very straightforward and in some ways easier than managing migrations using South.

Essentially, you'll run a single initial/fake migration at the outset, after which the manage.py syntax is almost identical to that of South. The big win from my perspective is that excluding an app name from the migration commands results in all apps being migrated.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/migrations/

So is this going to be like a squash - ie we'll have to make sure all of our systems are running the latest schema before doing this?

1.7 represents a huge step forward for Django.

Django developers and users may be less 'rabid' bunch. But were always around. Django wont be going away in a hurry, there are some major projects built with Django, like the OpenStack Horizon dashboard, Disqus. Theres an extensive list at http://www.djangosites.org/

Also, to any python developer thinking of learning Ruby just for Rails, give Django a try first, its a fantastic community.

can you cuss in their irc room? That's always the litmus for me.

I'm not sure if you're allowed to but I do it all the time and haven't been banned yet.

It's a minor release. The Django 1.5 and 1.6 release announcements got a lot more comments:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5287890
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682754

We use Django heavily at Pathwright. It does a very good job for us. We're all looking forward to 1.7, as it will be another solid step forward for us.

I'm probably going to offend some people with my phrasing, but the Django community is a little less culty/fanboyish than Node's. It's old enough where most of the shiny chasers have moved on (to Node), leaving the guys who are more worried about productivity than figuring out what is new/hot.

Every community has zealots and fanboys, but we (the Django community) are, as a whole, pretty chill and just trying to get things done. We don't need to chestbeat very much, because Django's track record speaks for itself (it powers some very large, very successful sites).

As far as excitement and activity, check this out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig...

On a related note, Does anyone have any experience with schema migrations in 1.7? Is it similar to South in function and performance? In other words, should I keep using South, or try to learn to use the new implementation? Do I need to be a guinea pig?

South will not be available in Django 1.7. Django 1.7 migrations have been developed by the same person that has developed South and can be see as an official successor to South. Therefore you have no choice but to use the new migrations.

Here's a link to the Kickstarter campaign which includes all conceptual information about this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-mig...

Here's a link to the official docs describing how to use migrations and the upgrade path from South: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/migrations/

The instructions in the docs cover how to migrate an existing Django project. What's more interesting to me is whether it'll be possible to have a reusable app with migrations that is Django 1.7 and Django 1.6-1.4 compatible. Sounds like not.

I tried Django for the first time last year. I had previously used Drupal/Joomla, but hated PHP. Plus Django was much lighter weight - it was easy to build a CMS with it, but also really easy to create something much more minimal.

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